


or somewhat of the kind of the

by howlikeagod



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: 16th Century CE, Aziraphale: i paid shakespeare’s bar tab once so you might say we know each other a bit, Crowley: You Are Like A Little Baby Watch This, Early Modern Era, Grief/Mourning, Minor Character Death, Multi, Other, can i tag 'canon character death' if the canon is Actual History?, how present do historical figures have to be before it technically becomes RPF?, overuse of the Julian calendar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-06
Updated: 2019-07-06
Packaged: 2020-06-22 07:49:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19662961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/howlikeagod/pseuds/howlikeagod
Summary: An angel and a demon walk out of a theatre. A spy walks into a bar.Fifteen ninety-three is a difficult year, depending on how you count it.





	or somewhat of the kind of the

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Anthony Burgess’s ~~Kit Marlowe/Thomas Walsingham fanfiction~~ novel _A Dead Man in Deptford,_ because I am the way I am and cannot be stopped.

Two hundred years later, historians would call it 1593.

At the time, the Gregorian calendar was little more than papal nonsense to the stout-hearted citizens of the Queen’s England. Or, they would have considered it such, if they had not been so busy dying of the plague. It would be yet 1592 until March.

The pestilence hammered at the walls of all London town for months. The filthiest cesspools of miasma and infection were ordered closed to prevent its spread. Aziraphale was quite put out by this, as playhouses were at the very top of such a list. It was a miracle indeed that they reopened for a short time in the winter—January, of course, meant a new play by a certain promising upstart[1], and following traveling players to the fresher air of the country would mean riding a horse all day to get there.

No, a miracle was the clear solution.

“What did you think of _Titus?_ ” a man-shaped creature who was categorically _not_ a friend asked with a snake-shaped smile.

“I seem to recall,” answered Aziraphale primly, “that you prefer the funny ones.”

“Was that not what that was?”

“My _dear boy—_ ” Aziraphale gasped, then interrupted himself with a sniff.“Well. I don’t know why I’m surprised. I suppose _your_ kind would find such grim events—”

“No, no, not that. I meant the part where they fall in the hole.” Crowley paused, but Aziraphale’s haughty disapproval did not waver. “You know. The brother falls in, and then he’s like, _Oi, help me, I fell in a hole,_ and his brother says, _I’ll pull you out in a mo’, not to worry,_ and then he falls in as well and now they’re both in a hole? No? Didn’t tickle you at all?”

“I rather thought the rest of it dampened any overall humorous spirit.”

Crowley shrugged. He insisted on growing his hair the human way, so the atrocious beard he said would eventually blossom into something quite fashionable wobbled awkwardly when he moved.

“No accounting for taste.”

“So you liked it?”

“Satan, no.” Crowley gave an exaggerated shudder. “I still can’t get the smell of sheep’s blood out of my nose, and I wasn’t even in the splash zone.”

“Mm,” Aziraphale hummed in reluctant agreement. “I do pity the groundlings.”

“Aren’t you normally one of them? You like to be right up in it, I thought.”

“Well, one doesn’t always… That is to say—”

“You,” Crowley’s mouth fell open in delight, a particular expression Aziraphale had come to know over the past millennia meant he’d said something the demon thought not particularly heavenly, “miracled yourself an expensive seat so you wouldn’t have to be close to that mess of a play.”

Aziraphale frowned at being caught out. He cast about for some defense that might exonerate both himself and the nice young man from Stratford—dreadful actor, but charming in his own way, and Aziraphale was relieved by and hopeful about his thus-far successful role behind the scenes—and settled on:

“It’s clear he was… inspired by his colleague in this one. I enjoy his more original works.”

“Colleague?” Crowley laughed. “You mean Kit? I wouldn’t call them _that_ just yet. Maybe if your friend sells out a theatre in the next decade and learns to write a half-decent couplet.”

“They’ve worked together a bit, or so I’ve heard.” Aziraphale narrowed his eyes as Crowley took a deep drink from his wine glass. “You call him _Kit?_ Do you _know_ each other?”

Crowley’s wine seemed to go down the wrong tube. He turned red in the face, took a moment to swap his windpipe for his esophagus, and choked out, “I like his style. Not his plays, mind, but—”

“He’s one of yours!”

“Mine?” The red in Crowley’s face didn’t abate even now he was breathing again.

“A… an agent of Hell! A damnèd soul!” Aziraphale put down his own glass heavily. Wine thought for a moment about sloshing out the side until he gave it a brief, warning glance and it settled back down. “I thought his take on Goethe was a bit of a bold choice, but the effects were impressive and I knew the rumors about actual demons turning up during performances were untrue—or _thought_ I knew, you… you wiley—”

“No!” Crowley shook his head fervently. “I don’t know him professionally at all. If anything, _he’s_ the tempter. Got me into this new thing—well, I say new, they’ve been doing it across the pond for centuries—tobacco, don’t know if you’ve heard about it—”

Aziraphale, as it happened, had a somewhat ostentatious pipe and nearly a pound of the stuff in a chest in the other room, but he didn’t feel the need to tell Crowley that.

“—and he—I mean—” The blushing demon gestured incomprehensibly with his wine glass. “I like his style,” he repeated.

Aziraphale raised an eyebrow. He was beginning to get an inkling of what Crowley might mean, but if either of them were going to say it, it wouldn’t be him.

“Heresy?”

“Hair.” Crowley muttered, looking deeply into his wine as if it were the other party in the conversation. “He’s got nice hair.”

“Well. You know what they say about a Cambridge man.”

“I—” Crowley’s eyebrows cinched together. “Don’t follow.”

“His meter,” explained Aziraphale. The joke was opaque, but if it had been any more explicit he wouldn’t have been able to stop from laughing. “Impressive metrical feet.”

Crowley groaned.

“It’s just a… a thing, alright, angel? Barely anything, really. He gives me tobacco and I—”

“Smoke his pipe?”

“Stop that! Why do you even know how to make jokes like that?”

“I _do_ go to the theatre, Crowley.”

“Consorting with actors and vagabonds and all sorts. Not very holy of you, though.”

_“Whatever you do to the least of these.”_

“Yeah, yeah, you just like to watch the sword fights.”

“And the speeches.”

“And the blood?”

“The _love._ And the…” Aziraphale looked about as if the right word might be written on the ceiling beams. His face lit up as he hit upon it. “The rhetoric.”

Crowley shook his head. He topped up his glass and mumbled, “Now you sound like Kit.”

“Oh?” Aziraphale tilted his head in innocent, cherubic curiosity.

“Loves an academic disputation, that one. Talked my ear off with a treatise on Hell, then turned it into a play just to win an argument.”

“So you _did_ have an influence!”

“Angel,” Crowley hiccuped, “if I’d gotten enough of a word in edgewise to give input on that script, there would have been a hell of a lot more jokes. And less bloody Latin.” He stuck his tongue out as if he’d bitten into a rotten egg.

“He did rewrite it,” Aziraphale pointed out. “Made some changes.”

“Not because of me!” Crowley snapped. Something in his uncovered eyes turned a sight tender, and for all his desire to needle the demon, Aziraphale worried he might have made a miscalculation.

Else, he might have harped just a bit too long on good Master Marlowe, and a bit too pointedly. Jealousy does not befit an angel—but then again, neither do many human habits Aziraphale had lovingly embraced over the last few thousand years. Tobacco, for example. Consorting with a certain demon, for another.

“I see.” Aziraphale gently pushed the bottle nearer to Crowley’s side of the table and settled back. “What would you say to a trip to the country once it warms up a bit?”

“Stalking the players again?”

“No, no, I’ve had my fill of the theatre for now, I think. But we’ve both been cooped up in London so long. I’d like to see the sea again.”

Crowley hummed thoughtfully.

“Might be nice to get away from all this plague.”

“There _is_ very little tempting to be done when everyone is so worried they’ll catch it any moment, isn’t there?”

“It’s like we always say Downstairs: damn hard to sin when the groin is full of buboes.”

“Exactly.” Aziraphale smiled. Crowley poured him more wine.

By May, it was 1593 proper. Aziraphale found Crowley in Deptford.

“Unmarked grave,” the demon said by way of greeting. “There was an inquiry and everything, and they tossed him out when they were done like—like…” He knocked back something mysterious and brown and strong enough that Aziraphale could smell it from two feet away.

Aziraphale took the stool next to him.

“Is this… where it happened?”

“Nah.” Crowley shook his head. “Eleanor Bull’s place. Upstairs room, locked door, three men enter, two leave, one gets carted out with a big bloody hole in his eye socket.”

“Dreadful business.”

“That was his business, yeah. Dunno if this had to do with whatever it was he was mixed up in. I only heard about it after.”

Aziraphale said nothing. He had experience in spades consoling humans through this sort of grief, but had no idea how well the same sort of tricks might work on a demon. And besides, Crowley knew him too well.

“Don’t know what I’m doing here,” Crowley continued. “Drinking my sorrows away over one little human. This is how I acted after the blessed Spanish Inquisition, you know, and that was so… _so_ many, so much worse.”

“You knew him.”

“A bit.”

Aziraphale ordered a glass for himself. It was something not quite so searing as Crowley’s, but he did feel an obligation to solidarity.

They drank in silence.

“I s’pose,” Crowley said at length, “part of it was… he reminded me of someone.”

“Did he?”

“He was, he was English, right, and intelligent, and—” Crowley swallowed visibly, laughed a tiny, hoarse little laugh, and said, “and a right bastard. And then he was gone, and I wasn’t anywhere near, and I thought…”

“What if it happened again?” Aziraphale guessed. “To someone else, this time.”

Crowley’s response was hardly audible, a mouthed more than spoken, “Yeah.” He shook himself, adjusted his dark glasses even in the dim light of the pub, and smiled with a small wobble and a large number of teeth.

“No great loss to the theatre scene, though, eh? Maybe now your country bumpkin will get a chance to grab all the glory. Might even write something halfway funny. Besides taunting priests, of course, but that’s low-hanging—”

“Crowley.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry.”

Aziraphale did not know how to say it, and would not know for another five centuries. But he said _I’m sorry_ and he hoped Crowley understood that he did, of course, mean _I won’t leave you that way._

It was an inefficient way to communicate. Then again, efficiency had never been Aziraphale’s strongest quality. He thought it was forgivable, this ongoing little failure; Crowley seemed to think so.

Crowley sobered. His empty glass made a quiet sound against the bartop.

“Yeah.” He stood and faced Aziraphale. “You said you’d never tried tobacco?”

Aziraphale smiled indulgently.

“Why don’t you show me?”

“Come on, then.”

Both went out together.

**Author's Note:**

> 1Not that Aziraphale approved of such language regarding the playwright, and, indeed, the next time one Robert Greene stubbed his toe on a bedpost it was with a touch more divine intervention than the event usually includes.[return to text]


End file.
